Trainer: Schwarzenegger disrupted Nazi gatherings

Posted: Sunday, October 05, 2003

Vanessa GeraThe Associated Press

GRAZ, Austria - In a gym plastered with photographs of his protege, Arnold Schwarzenegger's former trainer described Saturday how the California gubernatorial candidate helped break up neo-Nazi gatherings as a teenager.

Trainer Kurt Marnul told The Associated Press in an exclusive interview that Schwarzenegger was "filled with rage against the Nazi regime" and took part at least twice in organized disruptions of neo-Nazi gatherings in the southern Austrian city of Graz during the 1960s.

Marnul said he would send Schwarzenegger and his other young weightlifters to use their menacing brawn to intimidate neo-Nazis into leaving.

Like many in and around Schwarzenegger's nearby hometown of Thal, Marnul remembered him as a quiet boy obsessed with weightlifting and expressed disbelief that the action star professed admiration for Adolf Hitler, as news accounts in the United States allege.

"It's absurd. It's 100 percent wrong that he could have ever liked Hitler," Marnul said, sitting on a bench in his gym, a dark basement filled with aging weightlifting equipment where Schwarzenegger began training at age 15.

Marnul, 74, recounted seeing Nazi soldiers kill three people at a concentration camp, two of them Jews and one a child, and how that motivated him to break up neo-Nazi rallies later in life.

He told the AP he described his experiences to Schwarzenegger, who was about 17 at the time, and said the young bodybuilder reacted with shock and anger. He said Schwarzenegger, whose late father served as a volunteer with Hitler's brown-shirted storm troops, said such horrors were never discussed at home.

"He was so outraged - so filled with rage against the Nazi regime," Marnul said. "The stories really tore him up."